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The Märkische Schweiz Nature Park, 40 km east of Berlin, offers a unique natural and cultural landscape as well as an area for our project in and around the ‘Drei Eichen’ environmental education centre. By cooperating with the nature park administration, we will not only get to know the nature park and its surroundings, but also actively help to shape it.

We are offering this work camp because it is fun to have young people from all over the world with us and because we simply need a lot of hands for some of the work!

People and pets live on the grounds of the Drei Eichen environmental education centre - and there are almost always lots of guests: children, families, seminar groups.

We also want to reintroduce wild honeybees that originally lived in cavities in old trees back into our nature park. To do this, we build cavities in sections of tree trunks. You’ll help us with that. You’ll learn about the different types of bee tree-cavities, and how the bees are observed and cared for. This old art of beekeeping is called Zeidlerei.

For activities in between, Drei Eichen and its grounds offer many opportunities to learn about plants and animals, nature conservation and alternative ways of life and to actively participate. These include the tipi village and the wilderness education centre, the Zeidlerei station and a pottery workshop. Excursions or courses can be organised here by prior arrangement.

On some days, through your work on the farm you’ll be “giving something back to Drei Eichen” — because sometimes we need many helping hands, for example to build a small boardwalk for the pond, remove excessive plant growth from the pond, carry out construction and repair projects, or prepare areas for new planting in late autumn. We’ll decide this at short notice, depending on the weather.

At various locations in the Märkische Schweiz Nature Park, we will spend a few days helping to carry out various landscape maintenance tasks in different natural areas. The aim is to protect or promote either particularly dry or particularly wet sites, their soil and the native plants that grow there. Historically, these sites were created and maintained through a lot of manual labour - seasonal mowing and grazing by sheep and goats. Today, we help with this. There are many lakes that invite you to take a refreshing dip after work!

We also want to focus on the topic of water at the camp. The idea is to revitalise a dried-up pond by adding clay, thus keeping the water in the nature park and creating new habitats for amphibians, for example.

All work, whether in landscape conservation, craftsmanship or creative design, takes place outdoors. We plan together on site, depending on the current weather conditions, on which days we do which work and which days we take off.